Some interesting facts

COTTON

For as long as 7,000 years, cotton has been grown, picked, woven, and fashioned into materials as diverse as jeans, underwear, shirts, and even animal feed! Almost 757.1 million liters (200 million gallons ) of cottonseed oil are used in food products such as margarine and salad dressing. Even products such as toothpaste, ice cream, and, of course, the paper money used to by them, contain by-products of the cotton seed.

This productivity comes with a price. Conventionally grown cotton use a total of $2.6 billion worth of hazardous pesticides, some of them the most toxic in the market. These include carbamate pesticides, as well as broad spectrum organophoshates, which were originally developed as toxic nerve agents during Wold War II 

BANANA

There are over 500 varieties of banana today. This means that if you ate a different kind of banana each day, you would take almost a year and a half to eat every last one! In fact, about 99.5% of banana-eaters in the world are eating varieties of banana that have been selected by farmers and haven't changed in centuries. But wait : Not All Bananas Are Edible!

In any case, bananas are loved and eaten the world over. East Africans, and Ugandans in particular, eat around 450 kg(9921.1 lbs) per person per year. In East Africa, the word for bananas is "matooke," which also means"food".

Bananas may be valuable, but there are many problems involved in their cultivation. For instance, almost all cultivated bananas are seedless and sterile. This means that they can't be grown from seeds. Banana plants also take up to 18 months to fruit, which makes them even harder to breed.

If those problems aren't big enough, consider the fact that bananas can get sick, too. An illness of bananas called Black Sigatoka can cut a harvest by as much as 50%. Farmers control the disease by spraying banana crops with fungicide up to 40 times in one growing season.